Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That ...

What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

There’s no denying the importance Unix has had to IT over the years. As Unix turns 40 this summer, we at Computerworld wanted to find out whether the operating system will continue to play an ...

When considering the issue of best practice as it applies to the administration of Unix servers, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself. They begin with “What is best practice?

It is a well-known fact that the vast majority of viruses are written for Windows operating systems. Some would argue that this is because Windows is inherently insecure and is full of holes and ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...